Development of postgres is funded by the companies using it, for instance Amazon.
Elasticsearch and Redis are private companies that fund most of the development themselves.
When Amazon sell Elasticsearch and Redis, they are in direct competition with its creators.
Obviously such a situation isn't sustainable in the long run, and as such both Elasticsearch and Redis (and to my knowledge also mongodb) have changed their licenses to avoid that cloud providers sell their OSS product without paying a license or otherwise contributing back.
In the case of Elasticsearch and Amazon, Amazon even used the Elasticsearch brand to sell their own version.
As I see it it's a good thing that cloud providers are forced to take part in maintaining the OSS software (forked or not) that they are cashing in on.
FWIW, Redis was previously mostly developed by the community but the trademark was acquired by a VC funded tech company. AWS, and other cloud providers like Tencent, were contributing to Redis and they went ahead and changed the license anyways. You can read more about it here, https://lwn.net/Articles/966631/.
It’s the license type that matters, not how development is funded.
Postgres’ license is similar to BSD so even if Microsoft made and was the sole developer and sold it, anyone could distribute or sell it or whatever regardless of who contributes. Similar to Elastic’s old license and why Amazon was legal in what they did.
Amazon (and most all large companies these days) do a ton of OSS dev, but that doesn’t matter. The license of the various software counts.
Elasticsearch and Redis are private companies that fund most of the development themselves.
When Amazon sell Elasticsearch and Redis, they are in direct competition with its creators.
Obviously such a situation isn't sustainable in the long run, and as such both Elasticsearch and Redis (and to my knowledge also mongodb) have changed their licenses to avoid that cloud providers sell their OSS product without paying a license or otherwise contributing back.
In the case of Elasticsearch and Amazon, Amazon even used the Elasticsearch brand to sell their own version.
As I see it it's a good thing that cloud providers are forced to take part in maintaining the OSS software (forked or not) that they are cashing in on.